How to Make Sure You Don't Take Work Home With You

There are certain situations where you need to take work home with you. Perhaps you must finish a project and have come up against a hard deadline. Maybe your boss has strongly suggested or even insisted that you take work home to finish up by morning. However, if you are taking work home when you don’t really have to or because you are not properly managing your time during the day to be able to complete your work -then you might want to consider some changes. Continually taking work home and not respecting the work-life balance can negatively impact your health and increase your stress level. These two scenarios will then affect your work performance in a negative way. Basically, you are then sabotaging your own efforts to work to your optimal potential each day. This article will address how to make sure you don’t take your work home with you at the end of each day.

1. Evaluate the Situation

If you are constantly taking work home, you need to evaluate the reasons why. If you are tasked with this by your boss, then you need to continue to bring the work home -unless of course, you plan on getting fired or quitting, to then find a new job. However, if you are bringing work home often of your own volition, you need to evaluate whether or not that is extremely necessary. You might be falling into the negative behavior of a workaholic. Maybe you are simply mismanaging your time during the day and taking the work home out of necessity because you haven’t been meeting your deadlines.

2. Set Your Limits

Once you have honestly evaluated the situation, you need to ascertain what your specific limits and boundaries will be. For example, are you willing to accept continual assignments from your boss with regard to taking work home? If not, then you need to make a decision to discuss this with your boss in a mature manner, but be prepared to face the consequences of losing your job if bringing work home is a requirement of employment. If you have been taking work home because you haven’t been able to meet your deadlines, you need to set limits for yourself with regard to what daily activities are disrupting your workplace productivity, such as: laziness, personal phone calls and emails, excess time on social media etc.

3. Create a Realistic List

You then need to create a realistic to do list that will enable you to accomplish the specific tasks that are required of you each day. Focus on the most important tasks first and then move on to the less important. Refer back to your original job requirements listing that you should have received from your manager or personnel officer. Make sure that you are honest with yourself and your abilities while crafting this list. It is important to ensure that you remain a productive member of the company, while striving to not bring added stress into your life. You may need to schedule a meeting with your manager to review the situation and your prepared to do list so that you have a second opinion on how to properly delegate your time.

4. Be a Team Player

Sometimes you are not meeting deadlines and you needlessly have to take work home with you simply because you are not being a team player. You have developed an I-can-do-it-all syndrome and think that no one knows how to complete the tasks but you. This is fine if it’s true and you need to complete all these tasks by yourself. However, many times you may be hoarding work that was supposed to be delegated to other members of your team. If you can learn how to properly delegate the work, then your workload will be back to normal and all projects will be completed within deadlines—and you won’t have to needlessly take work home with you. However, there is one caveat here: make sure you are not delegating work to others that is your sole responsibility.

Do you have a habit of taking work home with you when you should be finding a way to become more productive in the workplace? Do you have an issue with being a team player and haven’t been able to properly delegate work tasks?